23 ms·

For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose

• WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
  "The boom on Bullshit-Articles on Bullshit-Job Boom," is here.
  • aetherspawn 8y ago
    With all the talk of BS jobs, you’d think the article would be shorter. I lost interest 2/3 way through - felt like it was going in circles. But I agree there could be some merit behind the premise.
    • laxatives 8y ago
      Its the New Yorker -- every article they write reads they like they get paid by the word.
      • sverige 8y ago
        Actually, they do get paid by the word.
  • davidivadavid 8y ago
    I for one have no idea why this concept gets so much air time given how little substantial foundations it's based on. I can find justifications that make all the so-called "bullshit" jobs perfectly valuable within a couple minutes of thought. I wish the inventor of the concept had invested as much.
    • komali2 8y ago
      What are the justifications for a bullshit job?
    • dvtv75 8y ago
      A friend of mine is a camera operator for a small production firm. They have some really old equipment, including tripods that aren't safe to use for their cameras, but they still cheap out on them anyway. He gets paid about $16/hour to stand by the camera for up to 20 hours a week to make sure it doesn't fall over, which costs around $10k/year. A new tripod would cost $1500 and could last for a decade, so $it's 100k vs $1500. Justify that, if you can. I can't, and I'm not being sarcastic or bitchy, I really want someone to explain it.
      • groby_b 8y ago
        Many possible explanations. One of the most common ones is cash flow. If you're somewhat at break-even, there just isn't any $1,500 around, but there are enough jobs to pay $320 a week, and do that every week. (This is by the way the same reason poor people often make "stupid" decisions) This is the most common case for smaller companies - it's all hand-to-mouth, and you barely squeak into profitability, so you minimize one-time expenses that shorten your runway. (What we around here like to call "Ramen profitable") There's also the fact that even with a tripod, you probably want somebody around - assuming they use high-end movie gear, a camera runs between $100k and $500k. Spending $10k a year on somebody who catches it in case of accident makes sense. I'm sure there are other explanations. I'm sure there are places that make stupid decisions, too :)
    • rockstartech 8y ago
      Please share these justifications then...
    • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      The reason it gets so much air time is because most of us encounter it during the course of our work. It's in our face so it's good to hear it called out for what it is.
  • sevilo 8y ago
    exactly my thoughts, does the world even gain much from reading these? I'd argue corporate lawyers, which he called bullshit jobs are way more useful
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      It keeps the topic in public's attention. Maybe when more people realize just how much economy is made of utterly wasteful zero-sum games, we'll have an environment ready to accept changes - which can be anything from culling those bullshit jobs to going full-UBI.
  • s73v3r_ 8y ago
    When was the bust on Bullshit-Articles, regardless of the topic?
  • stevenwoo 8y ago
    Both articles that have made the front page are simply articles about the same author, the last one was from the Guardian I distinctly remember. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-...
• ramen-san 8y ago
  "A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.” Hannibal, and many other of the bullshittiest employees, are well compensated, with expanses of unclaimed time." Wow... where do I sign up for one of these jobs!
  • ALittleLight 8y ago
    I once had a job where we had six months to train employees in the "India development center" how to do our current work and then we were supposed to find new jobs. Due to timezones every question took a minimum of a day to answer. I would show up late, answer yesterday's questions, dash off an email with some new description (6 months was far too much time to explain the job to them) and then spend the rest of the day reading in my office, taking long lunches, and running out for an "errand" which would involve going home to play league of legends for a couple hours. It was amusing for a time, but I enjoy being productive more.
  • sxates 8y ago
    I got a summer job in college as a web designer for a startup in Texas. It paid $40/hr, which was a ludicrous amount of money for a 20 year old in 2001, or at least it felt like it after having made $5.50 in high school. So I spent about a month working on the website, and doing buttons and other stuff, and then I was out of things to do. I literally might have a 10 minute task in a day, and no other assignments. I could (and did) watch full-length movies in my cubicle uninterrupted. Awesome right? It was the most miserable job I've ever had. I'd leave early and forgo billable hours because I just couldn't stand it. Being without purpose, but still showing up and pretending you should be there is really demoralizing.
    • komali2 8y ago
      I've recently read "Walkaway" which posited that the most satisfying life is one living in a community with what amounts to essentially a public Trello board with tasks on that anybody can do at any time. "take out garbage for the bread and breakfast" "clean solar panels on hospital roof" "priority: emergency!!! Man with broken leg needs bones set" that sort of thing. Given how satisfying I find open source work, I find the idea very attractive...
• ng12 8y ago
  This is one lesson you learn if you work in consulting. The biggest, most important companies in the world are chock-full full of glorified paper pushers. I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • jeff_petersen 8y ago
    > I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human. I've done that exact project for like 6 giant pharma companies.
    • selestify 8y ago
      Why do companies do this? Why don't they save a lot more money?
      • drewrv 8y ago
        The book goes into it a bit. Some of it is status (i.e. people wanting others working under them, even if it's pointless work), other times it's to claim they care about something even if they don't (imagine a company that pretends to care about their employees wellness, they could hire a wellness consultant and ignore the recommendations).
        • dvtv75 8y ago
          My workplace just went through that very thing. We had a company-wide review of employees attitudes, remuneration, equipment, the works. They released a letter telling us they were going to begin a few months later, starting with pay raises and equipment upgrades - and then did nothing. It's a year on from the initial review, and I guess they managed to complete their goal: stave off the riots for a while by letting the minions feel heard.
• kjgkjhfkjf 8y ago
  This article is hilarious, and perhaps there's some truth in it, but it seems to me that the anthropologist David Graeber has a substantial chip on his shoulder, and to me this taints the overall credibility of his thesis (inasmuch as the article represents it). The dig at Oxford's PR department seemed egregiously random to me. (I wonder if he was rejected by Oxford at some point in his academic career.)
• ironjunkie 8y ago
  All those articles about bullshit jobs are usually dull and only look at how far from the "action" you are, giving some moral high ground to the jobs that are closer to it. It is always the same thing repeated over. For a nurse for example: A nurse is a real useful job. The manager of the nurses, are semi-bullshit. The team of consultants writing softwares to dispatch the nurses to the patients are almost completely bullshit. The marketing people selling the software to dispatch the nurses are completely bullshit and non useful.
  • tomc1985 8y ago
    That's harsh, is it not? If the software fulfils its stated purpose and provides value then is it not useless? If the marketing people fulfil their duty to generate inbound leads are they not useless?
    • whatshisface 8y ago
      In the example, the idea is that nurses don't need minute-to-minute coordination - so having people in charge is mostly pointless except for performance evaluation, and software is completely useless.
    • Trundle 8y ago
      I believe the commenter was criticising the concept not agreeing with it.
    • ironjunkie 8y ago
      it's an oversimplified example, but indeed in this example it supposes that the nurses would be better off doing this themselves. As for marketing, this is the definition of bullshit job as I understood it: They generate leads, and it is needed only because every other company and competitors are doing marketing, as such it is defined as an "arm race", same thing for lobyists. If you removed all the marketers and lobbyist worldwide, the result would be exactly the same. as they are only needed to cancel each other but have no real effect on the end product or service
      • 8y ago
• ikeboy 8y ago
  >Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them. And how does he think disputes between companies or between companies and consumers should be handled?
  • s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Well, one might think there would be fewer serious disputes, and those that do arise there might be more incentive to actually work things out.
  • hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
    Yeah, a lot of these jobs he talks about are what I call "zero-sum jobs" - it sucks that they have to exist, but if any individual firm stopped having them, that firm would be behind. Money managers are a good example of this. At the end of the day stock picking truly is a zero-sum game, and all money managers can produce in total is the negative effect of their fees on their clients money, yet people pay them because they take the chance that their money manager will produce a better than average return. Similarly, the vast majority of marketing jobs are zero-sum jobs. True, a teeny minority do inform the public about a new product or service they wouldn't otherwise know about, but the vast majority are just trying to convince the public to use your widget over competitor's (actually very similar) widget. But any individual firm needs marketers, otherwise the competitors would take all of their business.
    • supahfly_remix 8y ago
      > At the end of the day stock picking truly is a zero-sum game If stocks give dividends, then stock picking isn't a zero-sum game.
      • ravar 8y ago
        To expand on this , growth is real , and it's not random. Value for society is created by having money directed towards more beneficial projects.
• ikeboy 8y ago
  >“Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. Or, fixing the issue after the fact is cheaper than a systemic fix, so duct tapers are more efficient.
  • s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Usually for a one-off, it can be cheaper to duct-tape than to do a real fix, but the problem is that those issues keep happening. So it doesn't take long for the duct-tape fixes to cost more in total.
• ry_ry 8y ago
  I'm a frontender. My speciality is client-side JavaScript. I'm not horrible at it. I freaking love my job and would do it for funsies of there weren't companies prepared to pay me to do it, but my job has been completed bullshit for as long as the role has existed. When the revolution comes I'll be the first against the wall against the wall alongside the digital marketing managers and the agile coaches.
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    ops and security will shoot the back end devs first if it makes you feel any better.
    • paganel 8y ago
      As a back-end dev I have the exact same instinct about what our ops guy would do to people like me. He’s a great guy, though.
  • ironjunkie 8y ago
    don't you think you help people navigating websites by making them more user-friendly ? I would believe that what you do doesn't really fulfill the definition of bullshit job as it helps people down the line.
    • alexbecker 8y ago
      Most of front-end work isn't making stuff more "user-friendly". It's an arms race of "fancy", showing off that your company is technically up-to-date and has money to burn.
    • tomatotomato37 8y ago
      Yes, for maybe the first 2 years. Then a maxima is reached, but UI designers gotta justify their paycheck, so they keep innovating right off that peak into the next valley
      • linkregister 8y ago
• valeg 8y ago
  >Still, I think Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct categories. Overall he presents the five types of bullshit jobs as flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters, but he spends too much time trying to lower the status of these jobs and not enough time investigating what happens when those jobs go away.¹ ¹ https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-shit-jobs-theory.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • linkregister 8y ago
    That was great. My favorite excerpt: > Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day.
• ilamont 8y ago
  If all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them. Obligatory Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy "B Ark" reference: The B Ark is technically named "Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B". The Golgafrincham civilization hatched a plan to eliminate its society of its most useless workers, namely its service sector and its paper shufflers. The Golgafrinchans created a legend that their world was about to be destroyed and they needed to build three arks. In Ark A they would put all the high achievers, the scientists, thinkers, artists, and important leaders. In Ark C they would put all the blue-collar workers, the people that build and make things. In Ark B they would put everyone else: hairdressers, TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. The B Ark was constructed, loaded up, and launched first. However, it was automatically set for a collision course with Earth's sun, to finally rid Golgafrincham of these twits. And naturally, no A or C ark was ever made.
  • komali2 8y ago
    Don't forget the phone-sanitizers, the lack of which caused the extinction of the Golgafrincham people to a rare ear-wax virus.
  • branchless 8y ago
    Greaber actually critiques this in the first chapter, disagreeing that hairdresser is a "bullshit job".
• ryandrake 8y ago
  > Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports This passage starts getting into why these jobs have to exist. 1. There are fewer useful things that need doing than employable people, so not everyone can get a useful job. 2. Everyone needs some kind of income. 3. Basic Income and welfare are politically difficult because of our Protestant cultural belief that income must be earned through work. If 1, 2, and 3 are true, then bullshit jobs must be created, or people starve/riot.
  • komali2 8y ago
    Is it rooted in Protestantism or just generalized zeitgeist for our planet? Even in the Soviet Union you had to work to eat, as I recall. I think it's shit - down with private property and all that. There is going to be a point in the next hundred years where we won't be able to justify millions of jobs, and none of my representatives seem to have any sort of plan in mind for when that happens.
• apohn 8y ago
  A large company I worked for was spending >$1M/year (data + data pipeline + personnel) on "Social Media Analysis." Every month a "Social Media Report" PDF was emailed to "key stakeholders and decision makers." When we asked them what they were doing with it everybody said they never really looked at it. When we asked them how it could be more useful they shrugged their shoulders. And yet the company was constantly talking about how great they were at their social media presence and using social media Analytics to keep their customers happy. I guess a sending out a monthly PDF on social media is self-explanatory to the value of if. So many people involved in something that was zero value.
  • throwawayqdhd 8y ago
    I work with B2B companies and I can confidently say that outside of LinkedIn, there is little to no value in maintaining an active presence on Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest/Instagram in most B2B segments
    • theshrike79 8y ago
      It does matter for getting the right kind of employees, basically it's used as branding the company as something people would want to work in. Most B2B companies are pretty hard to get any relevant information out of.
      • throwawayqdhd 8y ago
        I've seen far more mileage in maintaining an active presence on niche-specific platforms. A company that actively creates and shares interesting content on HN will have a much better brand image than one that does the same on Twitter. HN's smaller, self-selected audience will also land you better quality leads with less noise as compared to a large social platform
    • paulie_a 8y ago
      Unless you are selling to HR, I don't see any value in even keeping a LinkedIn presence.
• potta_coffee 8y ago
  I've finally found a job I'm good at, at a company that seems to make somewhat of a positive difference. At least, we provide a service our users need without producing and readily apparent negative impact. I've never been so happy at work. I fix challenging problems every day. I'm part of a really small team and I'm able to bring skills to the table that they are missing, which is fulfilling because I'm really having an impact. In the past, I've worked at shitty jobs where my work meant nothing and was even resented by my peers -- mostly because we were an "Agile" shop doing all the wrong things (death by meetings, retarded micromanagement, un-meetable deadlines). I'm super thankful for my current gig.
• bluedino 8y ago
  The ultimate land of bullshit jobs has to be in college administration
  • api 8y ago
    Yeah that's bad. Another big concentration is government contractors, especially huge ones. We had this idea that we would eliminate waste by privatizing government work. Hahahahahahahah...
• daodedickinson 8y ago
  No bullshit jobs at my employer. This is a by-product of regulatory capture disadvantaging small businesses.
• zby 8y ago
  The root cause is complexity. People don't understand their jobs: sometimes they are told to do stupid things, other times they do useful things but they think they are useless. Companies always relied on their employees to adjust their work to the overall goal - if they cannot understand the whole structure then this crucial organizational maintenance fails. If they see that their reports are not read - then they or their bosses should intervene - but now people don't understand what is the purpose of those reports, who should read them and why. Another thing is that in a complex organization there are many internal zero-sum mini-games - bosses that employ people only to increase their own importance, etc - then the job of these employees must be kind of useless. But the root cause of that is the same - it is the job of the boss of the boss (or maybe the CEO, or the board or the owner) to reduce that, but they don't because the complexity hides it. And then those mini-games add to the complexity itself creating a positive feedback loop. Jobs like lobbyists or corporate lawyers or much of PR departments are also about zero-sum games - but in a bigger organization - the nation as a whole. Military is a zero-sum game on yet bigger scale.
  • mseebach 8y ago
    I was with you until the end, but none of those functions are inherently zero-sum. Perhaps it's mostly a nit-pick, but zero-sum has a very specific meaning, and it isn't "stuff we wish we didn't have to do", which seems to be the unifying factor in those functions.
    • zby 8y ago
      Which particular one you think is not zero-sum? Military is kind of obviously zero-sum - the others are a bit more mixed - but the waste is in their zero-sum function (and the examples are not mine - they are from the article).
      • mseebach 8y ago
        Military in the sense that it deters attack can be massively positive-sum, depending on how you account for the value of not being attacked and maintaining national sovereignty. Military in the sense of, let's say, the Iraq invasion turned out to be massively negative-sum (but would have been massively positive-sum if the rosy optimistic nation-building intentions had worked). On the other hand, the Balkan interventions of the 90's were probably positive-sum, at least when you include the peace and relative prosperity enabled there, and not just limited to benefits in the home countries of the militaries involved. Graeber call these jobs "bullshit" or "useless", he doesn't to my knowledge call them zero-sum (and I didn't see that term used in the article?). My point was to agree with you that these jobs seem useless, but probably aren't, because exactly as you describe, of complexity (generally, of course, individual instances may well prove to be useless).
• cup-of-tea 8y ago
  I've been working in a financial company for the past six months and honestly there's more bullshit than real work. I'm now convinced that the entire finance world is the biggest scam of all time, but that's another matter really. There are entire levels of people whose only real purpose seems to be putting together PowerPoint presentations for other people. Literally producing entertainment for others who spends most of their time consuming that entertainment. I'm glad other people have observed this too. It makes me feel more sane. I hope to be back in a small tech company soon.
  • nasmorn 8y ago
    I have an anecdote from a good friend of mine who interned at an investment bank. After 2 days and nights preparing a presentation with other interns they observed the meeting where those hundreds of slides were flipped through in 10min. Asking why they had to expend so much effort if no one is even interested in the details the senior banker said. It is not about what you do, it is about showing the client we can do it.
    • t1lthesky 8y ago
      There's a column from Matt Levine where he explains the real purpose of useless busywork for ibanking associates. He gives an example of a guy making a PowerPoint who messes up one trivial formatting detail and his boss makes him redo the entire thing. On the surface this seems dumb and pointless, but the idea is that when that when that associate is a senior banker and working on a multi billion dollar deal, making some trivial mistake can potentially cost millions of dollars. The busywork as an associate is training to not make those mistakes in the future. Made a lot more sense to me explained this way. Not that I necessarily agree with it, and if I worked in that industry I would hate it, but a lot more reasonable than they just make you do it for no reason
      • RobertoG 8y ago
        It's not for not reason, it's for status, that it's the oldest reason in social primates. The most people you have reporting to you the more status you have in the organization. What do you make all those people do? Statistics and power points that you can show in meetings with other important people.
• partycoder 8y ago
  I always feel bad when I throw away those supermarket catalogs full of offers... Whoever is spending time designing them, is massively wasting time (and ink, paper, logistics). On the other side, enterprise software upsets me. Problems are usually solved through hiring rather doing actual work. After long sequence of 10 hires someone may actually get their hands dirty.
  • icebraining 8y ago
    I always feel bad when I throw away those supermarket catalogs full of offers... Whoever is spending time designing them, is massively wasting time (and ink, paper, logistics). They're not, though. I know multiple people who follow those offers and goes to different supermarkets depending on them (and most likely will buy some other stuff in that particular supermarket due to being there anyway). I'm guessing the supermarkets know pretty well that those are effective at bringing people in.
• mysterypie 8y ago
  I didn't quite understand what he was saying about President Obama's thinking, so here's the full quote from Obama: "Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?" So it seems that Obama didn't pursue a single-payer system because keeping 2-3 million "bullshit" jobs was more important than efficiency in the health care system, or at least it was part of his reasoning.
  • kardos 8y ago
    It's probably best to whittle away at that rather than unemploy 3m people in one go. Better for them to find another place in the economy slowly. At least, that's how I read it.
    • icebraining 8y ago
      If anything, ACA seems to increase their number, not decrease it.
  • linkregister 8y ago
    It just sounds like a realpolitik explanation that a bill that would cause that level of job loss should have a solution for the affected employees.
    • AstralStorm 8y ago
      That is assuming it will cause job loss of any appreciable amount. A backup plan is good to have and propose. My personal take is that a bunch of these pointless jobs would get shoved into government sector.
  • stevenwoo 8y ago
    Joe Leiberman would not have voted for single payer. He opposed moving Medicare eligibility to 55 and over so that had to be taken out of ACA. He (or any single Democrat) was the margin for passing the bill in the Senate with 60 votes to avoid the GOP killing the bill in the Senate. Also, if I remember correctly, the ACA is similar to but not identical to a GOP plan from the 90's and the state plan adopted when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts in the way you describe - continuing to use existing insurance companies.
• mysterypie 8y ago
  > bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole The incredible thing is that this happened without being a master plan of any government or even a cultural meme (an ideal like recycling, minority rights, literacy). No one sat in a meeting room in the 1950s and said, "Well, we're going to have massive unemployment in the decades to come, so let's start creating lots of meaningless jobs." It just happened. Gradually and without anyone noticing. Amazing.
  • wil421 8y ago
    Do you realize what kind of jobs don’t exist due to computers? You would have teams of people doing complex calculations or accounting. Milkman, elevator operator, and Linotype operator are a few that employed a lot of people.
    • Rjevski 8y ago
      But the “computer age” also created a ton of bullshit jobs that shouldn’t exist. If anything, milkmen, elevator & linotype operators provided actual value. What does “social media analytics” provide?
      • kristianc 8y ago
        > What does “social media analytics” provide? How many jobs do you think “social media analytics” actually creates? Probably not a 'ton'.
        • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
          No, but thanks to our hyper specialisation there are a ton of those types of job.
        • dnzm 8y ago
          Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually _was_ a ton.
• bane 8y ago
  This is tough. In many cases I think that people identify as superficially "worthless", I think there's a justifiable reason for those jobs even if it takes a little bit of digging to understand why it exists. For example, I know of a few jobs right now that a person does that, if it disappeared tomorrow, would have no immediate measurable impact on the company those jobs exist within. But wait a year or two and those jobs turn out to generate long-term cost savings to the company. But in other cases, jobs that seem to be superficially necessary turn out to not be needed at all. I just said goodbye to a colleague last week and after they left we went through their entire list of tasks and responsibilities -- things that kept an intelligent, highly educated, adult human fully occupied for more than 40 hours a week and paid well into six figures -- and entirely eliminated or rolled over all of those things with no specific impact to our work. The scary part was that much of it was work producing material that was highly demanded of by one of our customers -- the bulk of those 40+ man hours were reports and other deliverable. We simply told the customer that they wouldn't be getting some of that stuff anymore or it would take a different shape to satisfy the need and they were ultimately fine with it. What really concerns me are those jobs that need filling and nobody knows they exist and there's nobody doing them. Things that would eliminate waste, consolidate work, or expand business, but some collective blind spot prevents those positions from being realized. The classic examples in software are good QA people or in many small companies, good sales and business development people. If this still doesn't make sense to this tech crowd. I'll pose this, in the 90s the revolution was "making software useful to people by making the functions of the software discoverable in a well designed GUI". How many of us sit in front of entire screen fulls of discovery-free GUI-less command-lines all day typing out things that took thousands of hours to master and would be bulk eliminated if somebody just put a nice usable GUI in front of it?
  • theshadowknows 8y ago
    Qa people! I would easily give a finger, maybe not a whole arm, but a full finger to get a single, solid qa person on my team. We execute really well, but I don’t have the eye for detail and my team doesn’t have the skill set. But qa is “non revenue generating” and so we don’t hire for it. Even though we lose tons in terms of man hours and productivity due to errors that a solid qa person would help us catch early on.
• theshadowknows 8y ago
  The purpose of my job is to make me money. I make money by doing things that my company thinks is productive. Today I helped write some internal APIs. Last week I worked with legal on some stuff. Building “sexy” web applications or “disrupting industries” is great. But I can’t pay my rent or go to the movies because I shifted some paradigms. The purpose of my job is to make me money, regardless of what the job is.
  • cup-of-tea 8y ago
    But do you think they are productive? That is the key. There are many things my company thinks is productive but I think they are a waste of my life. Feeling good about "making money" isn't something that lasts. Eventually it's just that thing you have to do to maintain your completely normal lifestyle that you now take for granted. At that point you'd better hope the thing has more meaning than just "making money".
    • pqs 8y ago
      It is productive if it feeds and shelters your family. I once made peace with this and now I'm happier.
      • phito 8y ago
        If your only goal is just to make money for yourself, then you're a part of this "work bullshit" problem.
        • kup0 8y ago
          Yeah, but I don't really have the time or the freedom to care about whether or not I am part of the problem. At the end of the day, I need to live, and everything else takes a back seat to that.
          • olleromam91 8y ago
            How absurd. How dare you.
• ravenstine 8y ago
  > Last are “taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose job is to create and assign more bullshit for others. This is the most irritating aspect of any company I've worked for. I can deal with the fact that certain people are "duct tapers", people who take pick up the slack, "box tickers", etc. But people's belief that others need to be managed, especially when those others are already motivated, is demoralizing and destructive on so many levels. The bias of management creates a feedback loop when the employee does the work the way they would have done it had management not been looking over their shoulder, and the manager thinks to themself "It's a good thing I'm here, because nothing would get done!"
  • kingkongjaffa 8y ago
    Equally there is value in herding cats. My role is often times just to ask people what they think they need to do. often they know, often they just need to speak to department x and work together. for whatever reason they don't so my department herds the cats together and works to focus on what is the right problem to solve.
• mnm1 8y ago
  This is the reason liberal arts degrees are so useful and pay off. If you don't learn how to bullshit by the end of the four years, I would be surprised. I'm not joking though it may seem like it. I also don't think this detracts from the intrinsic value of such majors. If it allows more people to study what they want at university and improve themselves in addition to providing jobs after university, it's a system that's useful.
• deevolution 8y ago
  These bullshit job might exist because people need something to keep them occupied, otherwise they will revolt, vandilize, revert back to barbaric behavious and society as we know it would collapse.
• deleted 8y ago
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• NKosmatos 8y ago
  In case anyone hasn't seen/read the original article by David Graeber "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant", here is the link to it https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs
• sktrdie 8y ago
  But doesn’t everything we do serve no actual purpose? I mean anything that isn’t like providing food or shelter or medicine (basic survival needs) is essentially useless. Capitalism made it so we created for ourselves these “useless jobs” to have the money flow around. I think it’s actually quite normal. Jobs are created because someone has the interest (not a strict need) for what you will do. Whether that’s a useless PowerPoint presentation or a short-animation movie or a newly-fashionable pair of shoes, it’s all part of what people are interested in. How else would you model a society so that we can make for ourselves all these peculiar inventions and systems that entertain us? Sure we could have just everyone work on the sheer necessary stuff; but that’s boring.
  • cup-of-tea 8y ago
    Unless you believe in some "higher purpose" you have to find your own purpose in life. Mine is to learn as much as I can to become the best version of myself such that I will leave a legacy. Some people find purpose in procreation although I would argue that's too easy and not necessary. I find pleasure in the things I work on. Programming, music, food to name a few. I use technology when it can make my life easier without sacrifice in quality or it can do a better job than I can. I don't strive for convenience. Nobody on their deathbed relishes in memory of a convenient life. So, for me, work that leads to technology to enable the above absolutely has purpose.
• dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  Well, the purpose has always been one: to make money. From the article: > I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting. The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point. Many people would dream about such an opportunity. Yes, the usefulness of the final product for the humanity is negligible. However, it allows you to live, to develop, maybe also take care of your family, give your friends some happiness - I definitely wouldn't call it "no purpose". If you did that and received no remuneration - that would be another question.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    That's a given. But the "pointless/bullshit job" label is applied from the point of view of people who care about more than just getting money - people who also want to feel like they're actually contributing something to society, and people who like to take a more global and less selfish view of the world.
    • dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
      They need to find a specific job, then. It's hard to expect that you come to just any corporation and will make the world a better place. Moreover, I'd say that these days the opposite is more probable. We always hear the mantra that the main purpose of corporations is to increase the shareholder value, and we reap what we sow.
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        It's more than that. A lot of those bullshit jobs don't really even help increase shareholder values. They're mini zero-sum games within companies, or between companies. Jobs that exist to cancel each other out. Zero-sum games have this magic feature that if you unilaterally opt out of them, you lose. So they persist, even though if all players simultaneously opted out, everyone would be better off.
• deleted 8y ago
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• TomMckenny 8y ago
  The price of labor is so cheap now apparently there is almost no incentive to clean this up. Consider that even small sandwich shops consider it worthwhile to hire a guy to stand on a street corner waving a sign or dressed as a pickle. I suppose we as a society have decided to do this rather than guaranteed minimum income or any other livable social safety net.
• CalRobert 8y ago
  Guerilla advertising to this effect appeared on the tube briefly. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvq9qg/david-graeber-pointless-jobs-tube-poster-interview-912 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvq9qg/david-graeber-poin... Timed such that they appeared as most people were heading back to work for the first day after new years'
• pjc50 8y ago
  It's not really surprising, when so much effort has been invested in erasing any kind of higher purpose than money from western society. The idea that there is an obligation towards one's fellow humans and citizens leads to the idea that the mega-rich might be obliged to share a bit -- so that had to be silenced.
• sornaensis 8y ago
  In college I had a (sort of) BS job at a real estate start up that was doing home renovations. They hired an accounting consultant to help them get their books together (dude was 75 years old, and they paid him something like 10$k/mo for his consulting) to go to a bank for more money or something along those lines. One of his ideas was to move everything they had out of quickbooks online into quickbooks enterprise and remap all of their accounts into this bizarre configuration. So they hired me to automate this process (they had hundreds of accounts, each with sub accounts and whatnot). Anyway the guy was mercurial as all heck, so every day pretty much was spent starting from scratch and months were spent just figuring out whether they wanted to move to enterprise or not so I had to write multiple solutions which never got used. The manager who hired let me do different work when the consultant was MIA so I ended up writing some web scrapers and different automation tools that nobody ever used for anything. Eventually they figured out that the consultant was scamming them and fired him. Thankfully that gravy train lasted right up to graduation and I was able to get a real job. I guess it wasn't so much that the job was BS, but that people at the company had a whole lot of vague ideas about 'increasing productivity' that I was perfectly happy to oblige, but unfortunately none of them were really interested in actually taking advantage of them. So the stuff I wrote pretty much just sat there, and people seemed perfectly happy doing everything manually. Super weird to me. Also it was stressful because I kept feeling like I wasn't actually producing anything and that I would be fired at any moment but the management did not seem to mind that they were paying me a decent amount of money to play with code all day.
• bigbluedots 8y ago
  As far as I can tell, almost all jobs are here to keep us busy earning to live to work. There are enough resources for everyone to be fed and comfortable, however.
• afpx 8y ago
  It’s really hard not to be cynical. Like when I realized that I could drive 10 minutes to a local oat farm and buy 15 kg of oats for $2.50 (the commodity price of oats) Or, I could drive to the market and pay almost 100x more for oats in the form of cute little Os. Yes, I know - I’m leaving out many, many, many important details, but still - that’s quite a ‘value chain’.
  • Double_a_92 8y ago
    The bullshit jobs are propably the cause of that value chain factor. Is the packaged oat really worth 100x more to the consumer? Maybe it's worth 10x more. That means 90% of the work used to make those was bullshit.
• d--b 8y ago
  > Left to their own devices, Graeber points out, people tend to do work like students at exam time, alternately cramming and slacking. Possibly, they work this way because it is the most productive way to work. Most of us would assume that a farmer who started farming at 9 a.m. and stopped at 5 p.m. five days a week was strange, and probably not a very good farmer. Smart! I never thought of it that way! I'm a remote part-time engineer and I totally do cram-and-slack. It should be a management style.
  • Timpy 8y ago
    I wonder how a farmer would describe their work cycle. Do farmers feel like they're cramming and slacking? The impression that I get is that farming is more cramming. I don't really know anything past the general public perception of farming though.
    • ahartmetz 8y ago
      Depends. For a Central European farmer without cattle, there is not much work in winter. You can maintain machines and buildings and such. Farmers with cattle are more constantly busy. My parents got rid of the few cows they had based on economic calculations and, frankly, a desire to have vacations sometimes. Some old farmers thought they were crazy (it was a few decades ago). Of course, it went just fine.
  • ahartmetz 8y ago
    Developer and son of a farmer here. It's a bad analogy. In farming, there are very real "deadlines", and you can do 14 hours of useful physical (well... driving machines) work for a few days at a time. At other times, there really isn't much to do. You can find something to do if you want, but it doesn't make much of a difference. In software, your mental capacity is the most real limit, and it's limited to about 5-6 hours per day for the most demanding part of the work. You get the most out of it by using it every day. Having just the right amount of work to do is hard, but working creatively for more than 6 hours per day is impossible. I have talked about this with many people and everyone seems to agree with 5-6 hours. (As somebody with a home office, I find that a very long break in the middle of the day may allow an extra hour or so)
• wigwaml 8y ago
  Ironic that the the production of this article was itself a bullshit job - summarising work that does not need summary, presumably to fill a contractual requirement to submit x articles per year. David Graeber is great. Go read the real thing, either in the Guardian [0] or one of the books. His history of debt is mind-bending. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-job https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192 https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/...
• caboteria 8y ago
  At my company, a small startup, I recently attended a meeting whose invitation list included 4 managers and 2 workers. From that I can extrapolate that the bullshit to work ratio is 2 to 1. They're working to fix it, though: they're hiring more managers.
• anm89 8y ago
  Ignoring the fact that this article (and I'm assuming the book it's based on) seems to just make repeated assertions as to the degree of "bullshit" work in the economy and then backs it up with mostly anecdotes, my real question is: what is he actually advocating for. So should we destroy all of these "bullshit" jobs? Who decides which ones need to go? Somehow I feel like the people complaining loudest about all the "bullshit" jobs would be the first ones rioting and breaking windows if those jobs were to disappear from our economy. I guess this is where someone throws out the term UBI and glosses over the details to assure us that jobs are no longer necessary in the post capitalist utopia we have found ourselves in. (don't the UBI arguments always focus on the fact that people will still choose to work though?) I wonder why Spain, Portugal and Greece haven't realized that their problems are imaginary yet and started handing everyone a UBI.
• Timpy 8y ago
  Larger airlines create really well produced (and expensive) safety guideline videos as a supplement to the safety speech before each flight, and they still have attendants pantomiming the safety procedures. Smaller flights just have the attendants. I think this is a form of branding, it "feels" like a better product when you have a video with expensive production values. Is it necessarily true that a bullshit job has to server no purpose? I think a doorman is like the safety video. It makes the product feel more expensive. I agree it's a bullshit job, but it contributes to the impression your company is making. Maybe a well produced Analytics Report makes a sort of impression like this too. At a glance you can prove you are a high end company that has everything together, and produces sophisticated reports as evidence. Even if it's a bullshit report, spending 5 figures to make the report is worth it, if it secures a bunch of 6 figure customers. I'm not saying we should secure bullshit jobs, I'm just trying to voice some more perspective.
  • SCdF 8y ago
    > I think this is a form of branding, it "feels" like a better product when you have a video with expensive production values. I'm only familiar with Air New Zealand's productions, but they are totally marketing / patriotism / more marketing. In that sense they form a very important function: they do some crazy video that gets them in the news again, reminding people they exist and solidifying the idea that they are a fun airline you should totally pay slightly more than the competition to fly with. (full disclosure, I am a New Zealander who will fly AirNZ if given the opportunity, so clearly it worked on me!)
  • Vektorweg 8y ago
    The question boils down to marketing. If a company spends more money on marketing, every rival company will do so too. They are creating jobs, that would cancel each other out.
• booleandilemma 8y ago
  My company has at least two people whose primary job seems to be creating Outlook meeting invites.
  • cmjqol 8y ago
    Yeah don't worry I have people like these too , and they also are responsible to physically call people to make sure they will come to the invite.
• atrexler 8y ago
  "Who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"
• koliber 8y ago
  I don't agree. Almost everyone's work serves a purpose. However, that purpose may be tiny, short-lived, subtle, or difficult to see. As the world becomes more automated, it will become more so. As many before me have posted in this thread, the purpose of the work is often not what it appears to be. You could say a security guard sleeping in a booth is not doing anything or has a purpose-less job. But just by virtual of being there, he is a small deterrent to would-be thieves. I feel that is the case with many jobs. It's very easy to round down from "serving a very small or obscure purpose" to "purposeless". However, add up all of those tiny purposes and you get a functioning company or society.
• twetge 8y ago
  My old job was in advertising. Some of what I produced actually informed consumers about new products. But most it was vanity projects. One example: A chiropractor paid for a billboard with him standing next to a million dollar therapy machine, despite the fact that no potential customers would understand what the machine was. He just wanted to show his competitor that he could afford a shinier new toy. Since most of the treatments he offered were medically dubious, it would have still been bullshit even if we made an effective billboard. Believe it or not, most of our projects were like this - the result of someone's vanity or stupidity. But even the good work we did, most of it just part of some companies advertising arm's race with their competitors. If the entire ad industry collapsed tomorrow, the only thing we would notice was the lack of junk mail littering our mailbox. I'm happier in my new job, though it's no less bullshit. I run a social media product that doesn't have a measurable impact for 95% of my clients. In truth, they don't need social media in their industry. But they've been told "everyone has to be on Facebook nowadays" and that's how I make a living.
• mdo123 8y ago
  One of my summer jobs in high school was that of "towel boy" at the swim and tennis building of a country club. My only job was to sit in front of the towels, make the guests sign the clip board, and count how many towels they took. I wasn't allowed to read or do anything because I was told it would look bad, so I literally sat in a chair all day holding a clipboard. I got so bored that for amusement I would write down 100 random digits, memorize them, and recite them to some of the kids running around.
• jokoon 8y ago
  Sometimes I really want to be able to want to live my life without work and pursue my personal projects (which could bring money in the end). But the idea of living off welfare is such an enormous taboo and so politically incorrect, that I could risk ending up homeless for the mere act of not working in fast food or looking for a job. It's not slavery, but the fact that I am obligated to obey is making me uncomfortable. I'm sure there are many developers who are able to create new things without having to rely on a degree, a job or a start up. But yet, sitting at home coding can be viewed like being a poor artist.
• danzig13 8y ago
  I also think some level of the reverse - maybe not - is true. Things are not that complex and high school graduates can do fairly high status jobs.